Good news: San Francisco public school lunches likely to improve soon

This January my mornings as a mother of two children who attend a public elementary school in San Francisco could dramatically change. I might no longer need to rise in the wee hours of the morning, a half hour before my kids wake up, to chop fruit into little pieces, clean moldy plastic containers and slather peanut butter and honey onto pieces of bread.

Any parent who has made their children school lunches every morning knows that it’s a thankless job.

You send your kids out the door with beautifully packed meals and they return home after school to tell you that the kiwi wasn’t ripe or that the apple sauce exploded or that you put too much jelly in the sandwich so the bread turned soggy and, to use my kids’ favorite word, disgusting.

Yesterday my daughter experienced one of those lunch box disasters. A container of yogurt erupted and when she came home she handed me a lunch box caked in strawberry goo. Nothing was eaten. The nitrate-free salami sandwich was mushed and crumbled. The organic grapes, plucked from their stem and neatly placed in a BPA-free container, were untouched. I handed back the lunch, which I obviously spent way too much time and money on, and said, “You deal with it—and you’re eating that sandwich for dinner.”

Yes, I’m probably exaggerating the overall situation. My daughter sometimes packs her own lunch and often my kids devour every crumb, but those early mornings when I’ve toiled over lunches and my children later return from school with an unopened Thermos of homemade chili are what stand out. I’ve tossed far too many apples with only a few bites taken out of them.

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Prefrozen Swedish meatballs and green beans wrapped in plastic: This is what's for lunch in San Francisco public schools. But next year, this might change. (Michael Bauer)

You might say, Why don’t your kids buy school lunch? Here’s the thing. The lunches served in San Francisco public schools right now are an embarrassment to this city that’s known as one of the best eating towns in the world. I invited The San Francisco Chronicle‘s renowned food critic Michael Bauer to my kids’ school a few years ago to sample one of the meals and raise awareness about the quality of the food. Bauer found the Swedish meatballs too salty, the green beans soggy and frozen tasting and the overall meal “discouraging.”

I hate to be so harsh because the budget has been impossibly tight, giving the district few options, and well-intentioned people have worked hard to improve the lunches in recent years. What you find on a lunch tray today is vastly better than what you found 10 years ago. Baby carrots and California-grown apples are now common side dishes—but the main hot course is a disgrace. Yes, these meals meet federal nutrition guidelines, but they’re prepared in Illinois, wrapped in plastic, and trucked across the country to San Francisco where they’re reheated in ovens.

I’m not kidding. San Francisco—a city that’s known for Delfina and the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market—is serving its school children food that’s prepared in the Chicago suburbs. What’s more many of the offerings are downright unappetizing to a child. Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes? Maybe good when prepared by your Midwestern mom, but not when served TV-dinner style.

All of this could, and probably will change, starting January 7. This week San Francisco Unified School District announced its intent to award next year’s meals contract to Revolution Foods in Oakland, a company that’s known for getting fresh meals made from real ingredients into schools.

Starting January 7, San Francisco public school kids might be eating meals that look something like this.

It’s not a done deal but when I talked with Ed Wilkins, director of Student Nutrition Services for SFUSD, he said that starting January 7 kids will likely be eating chicken Caesar salads, turkey and cheese sandwiches, vegetarian chili and cheese enchiladas. Listening to him rattle off a list of sample meals made me hungry while typically when I step inside my kids’ school cafeteria the last thing I want to do is eat. What’s more, none of the food will be prefrozen. All meals will be served 24 hours after they were prepared.

The Board of Education will vote on the proposed contract with Revolution Foods on December 11, 2012. Wilkins, who has worked and fought hard to present this change, says the board is overwhelmingly supportive of improving school food so he’s confident that next year sesame chicken wraps will be on SFUSD menus. The district will kick in some extra money to support the step up, but Revolution Foods was the lowest bidder that met new federal nutrition guidelines and SFUSD’s future vision for school food.

“This has been a long journey for me,” Wilkins said. “It took me a long time to get here. We knew there were going to be cost increases and we budgeted for them.” The new meal contract would cost SFUSD about $9 million annually.

When I heard the news I nearly started dancing, Gangnam style—and not only because a change to Revolution Foods would make my life better. This new contract would improve the lives of families and children all over the city.

Children should be a number-one priority and in order to learn and grow kids needs healthy, nutritional meals. I’ve worked at the lunch hour at my kids’ school where more than half, maybe even 75 percent, of the students are eating school lunch. Many of these kids are from low-income families and they’re served a free meal—possibly the only “nutritional” food they’ll see all day. But most of the food ends up in the compost bin. The graham crackers, sugary muffins and milk are consumed, but the plastic cover on the hot meal is never even pulled back. Something tells me that kids will be much more likely to bite into a freshly made turkey sandwich than prefrozen cheesy, chicken, potato broccoli bake.

When I told my daughter about the possibility of school lunches getting better, she said, “Oh Mommy! Now Ella* and Emma* will no longer be hungry. They have to eat school lunch every day and they only ever drink their milk and eat graham crackers—and I always have to give them my strawberries.”

Next year, let’s hope I’ll be giving up morning lunch-making duty and instead sending my kids to school with $3 in their backpacks so they can buy a Rev Foods meal (this all means an extra half-hour of sleep every day!). Better yet, kids across the city will be returning to their classrooms after lunch with their stomachs full and ready to learn. An overly idealized vision? Probably because many kids will turn up their noses up to Caesar salads, but anything is better than salty Swedish meatballs and soggy green beans.

Curious to see what kids are eating around the world? Here’s a look at school lunches in 20 different countries.